Spring Blitz and Ethiopian Doro Wat

It is quiet in my house now, and we are recovering from a busy but fun weekend. Fresh cookies are on the stove, and the kids and I just grabbed two each. Mmm, warm chocolate chip cookies. (They are from a pre-made mix, but still wonderful when hot from the oven.)

This weekend was Spring Blitz, the senior high retreat in a northern city. It was such a great weekend. We had 28 of us there, and had great times of worship, good messages, fun hotel room Hot Seat bonding times, and awesome Holy Spirit movings in people’s lives! It was so moving to see and experience it. Peggy and Terry, thanks for watching J & M! Sorry about the delay.

Today I worked, enjoying glimpses of the big soft flakes of snow whenever I passed a doorway or window. It’s beautiful! Then Mark and I took a nap this afternoon, catching up on Blitz sleep. This evening I made an easy Ethiopian dish from a recipe I found and used last week. It’s a new form of the Doro Wat, a common Ethiopian chicken “stew” or sauce that they eat with injera bread. Here’s the recipe, if you are interested.

Brown 1 large onion, getting it quite brown.
Add:
3 oz oil
1/2 teas. Bere Bere powder
1/2 teas. black pepper
1 tbs fresh minced ginger
Blend them into the onions, Add 1 cup water. Stir.
Earlier, while the onions were browning, put raw cut up pieces of chicken (3 lbs) into a bowl of 1/4 cup lemon juice and 2 cups water to marinate for at least 10 mins.
Later, drain the water from each handful of chicken pieces, dropping the chicken into the simmering onion sauce. Stir through, then cover and simmer over low heat until the chicken is cooked and tender.
Add more water if necessary to bring to stew texture or add flour to thicken. (I usually had to thicken slightly.)

Optional: add 8 hard boiled peeled eggs. I didn’t actually have eggs in the house each time, so I did without the eggs. Today, I added about 1 cup of cooked, almost mashed red dal lentils into it to thicken it. Delicious! It serves our family of 4, with some leftover for my lunch tomorrow at work! 🙂

The kids flew outside just now to build Calvin and Hobbes’-inspired snowmen–probably some of the last snow of the season! I dissuaded them from having the snowmen block our cars into the driveway. They settled for having the snowmen march up our front steps. They play happily in the darkening twilight.

Mark is at a VBS meeting tonight and then he’ll have a Men’s Bible study here tonight at 8:30.I will hide away in the bedroom then to give them privacy and try to clean my room.

How are you? What is new in your life?